Who said dinosaurs were extinct?

Dinosaurs were named by a British scientist in 1841, from a pair of Greek roots meaning “terrible” and “lizard.” Their fossils had been familiar in Asia for centuries – witness the mythology of dragons and griffins. But only gradually did dinosaurs become an essential part of the public imagination. Early 20th-century movies like The Lost World, King Kong and Fantasia played a key role. So did the atomic bombs that brought the Second World War to an end. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humans began to realize that we too could go the way of the great reptiles. In cultural terms, the outstanding attribute of dinosaurs is not their size, strength or diversity, but their extinction.

Starting in the 1950s, a dinosaur became a powerful metaphor for any person or institution unable to adapt to change. George Romney, a Republican governor who (unlike his son Mitt) dared to speak his mind, coined the phrase “gas-guzzling dinosaurs” to refer to the three largest carmakers in the United States. Punk rockers dismissively referred to the flamboyant progressive groups of a slightly earlier generation – Genesis, the Moody Blues and so on – as “dinosaur bands.” The metaphor is often deployed by political columnists. The Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin, for example, once wrote that although Stephen Harper isn’t old, “to the young, (he) still comes across as a dinosaur.”

It can be a brutally effective piece of scorn because it’s so unanswerable. To say “No, I’m not a dinosaur” is a bit like saying “Yes, I do have a sense of humour” – or even “Yes, I’ve stopped beating my wife.” It doesn’t help, if you’re accused of being a dinosaur, to point out that the creatures were tremendously varied in habits and form, that they flourished on every continent and that some of them evolved into modern birds. All that matters is that they eventually disappeared.

Which is why I was annoyed to read a feature in The Gazette’s business pages last Saturday that stated: “In this era, the dinosaurs of publishing – newspapers, magazines and books – have not yet figured out what role they will play.” If they’re dinosaurs, in the way the metaphor is normally used, they will play no role whatever. The reporter announced: “With publishing gone, the post-publishing era means reading will be done on screens.” He quoted a “renowned new media guru,” who deplored the failure of books, magazines and newspapers to have “reinvented what’s appropriate for this new world.”

Speaking as an unrenowned old media dinosaur, I’m always a little suspicious of stories that constantly resort to the word “new.” Journalists, perhaps fearing for their jobs in the future, and not wanting to be left behind in the general stampede for change, are liable to overvalue the latest forms of communication. A striking example appeared in this newspaper on New Year’s Eve 2011, when a fashion feature began with the extraordinary statement: “This is the year that Twitter exploded, rendering the narrative form and everybody’s attention span virtually obsolete.” Really?

The trouble with such predictions and overstatements is that if they’re repeated long enough, people start to believe them. And the breathless hype comes to seem more plausible than the sober truth. But in April of last year, a Toronto firm named Higher Education Strategy Associates sampled 1,370 Canadian undergraduates about their learning experience. The expectation was that students would be keen on electronic learning, and hungry for more of it. The results showed otherwise. Asked if they preferred having their course materials in electronic or hard-copy format, more than 82 per cent of these students said they preferred hard copies. Pieces of paper. Books.

Remember, these young people are “digital natives,” to most of whom iPhones, iPads, Tumblr and Facebook are second nature, and for whom Twitter is supposed to be trending. But when they were asked to rate the quality of education in courses that relied partially or entirely on electronic teaching, 49.4 per cent said the quality was higher in courses with a live instructor and no electronic element. 44.3 per cent saw no difference. And only 6.4 per cent said the quality was higher in courses that were taught electronically, using live-streamed lectures, online texts and so on.

What a large tribe of young dinosaurs! Of course, dinosaurs were around for more than 100 million years.

markabley@sympatico.ca

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.